Scoop: Ignatieff aide improperly ordered crown corp to switch to Liberal ad agency

Back then, Kinsella was the executive assistant to the public works minister. And according to sworn testimony by Georges Clermont, the president of Canada Post at the time, Kinsella telephoned and ordered him to switch ad agencies to BCP – a Quebec ad agency run by Liberal strategist and donor John Parisella.

Here’s Clermont’s sworn testimony, with particularly appalling passages in bold text:

MR. CLERMONT: … a week after the arrival of the government -- it was during Mr. Dingwall’s time, he was the Minister in charge -- his assistant, Kinsella, telephoned me to say “We have to change agencies”.

MR. ROY: Agencies ---

MR. CLERMONT: Advertising agencies. We have to give it to BCP.

During Chretien’s tenure as prime minister, BCP was one of the top three firms to handle the Canadian government’s $1.1 billion in ad spending. Not coincidentally, from 1993 to 2003, BCP contributed more than $97,000 to the federal Liberals alone, according to this audit.

Firing perfectly good ad agencies to replace them with a Liberal favourite wasn’t Kinsella’s only demand of Canada Post -- supposedly an independent agency, supposedly run on sound business principles, not patronage and nepotism. Kinsella also ordered them to fire a labour lawyer – right in the middle of a labour dispute he was handling – because the lawyer's political pedigree wasn’t Liberal enough. Again, the sworn testimony:

MR. CLERMONT: We had to provide them with a list of legal firms that specialized in advice on all sorts of -- to be sure they were the right ones. So we had to change a lot of -- but I objected on several occasions, because we were being well served by the firms in question or the consultants, et cetera.

MR. ROY: And how did you react to the instructions you were given?

MR. CLERMONT: …I did object on a number of occasions. For example, during the labour dispute, I was asked to retain the services of a lawyer other than the one who was doing it on the pretext that that lawyer’s father was a conservative, but he had been appointed by vote, and I refused. I said “You don’t change horses in the middle of the race”, and the result was a lot of headaches for me with the stakeholder.

I love that -- "the stakeholder". That's how Canada Post refers to the public works minister -- and his assistant at the time, Kinsella. Needless to say, that kind of brazen political interference was a shock to Canada Post, an independent crown agency that was used to operating at arms length from politics:

MR. ROY: At the time that you received that call from Mr. Kinsella, was BCP the agency -- what we call Agency of Record, was the Agency of Record for the Canada Post Corporation?

MR. CLERMONT: If I recall correctly, we had at least two, if not three agencies, Agencies of Record, to which we would go depending on the subject. We had… I think it was Vickers & Benson, but an agency that had a greater presence in Canada than, say, BCP, which seemed to us to be focused more on Quebec. So I think that during the Lander years and the first years of my mandate, we mainly dealt with Vickers & Benson and very little, if at all, with BCP.

BCP wasn’t used by Canada Post because it was a provincial Quebec firm, not a national firm. Who cares – a Liberal’s a Liberal, and that was what mattered to Kinsella!

Clermont was shocked. But it would be the first of “a lot” of similar patronage requests, where loyalty to the Liberals was put ahead of the interests of the taxpayer (or Canada Post's customers).

MR. DORAY: …Were you able to check whether this was standard practice in the past, or was it a surprise to you, the fact that you had been asked to change agencies in light of the change in government?

MR. CLERMONT: Listen, I wasn’t born yesterday. This was my first such experience, but I wasn't born yesterday. I ---

MR. DORAY: And, this time, you didn’t complain to Mr. Ouellet, as you did in other situations?

MR. CLERMONT: No, no, this was the first intervention… I don’t remember exactly, but later on there were a lot of requests such as this.

Clermont knew he was being hustled. He tried to find someone in the government who could fend off Kinsella – so he pulled rank, and started complaining to another cabinet minister, more senior than Kinsella’s own boss.

MR. FOURNIER: …you had a number of reasons for complaining about Mr. Kinsella’s work?

MR. CLERMONT: Yes. Well, requests, not his work. His work may be excellent, but his requests.  

MR. FOURNIER: His requests. Which, in your opinion, went beyond what a minister’s political advisor should be doing?

MR. CLERMONT: Look, I may be naive, but we were accustomed to not having this type of call, and, as I told you, as I said this morning, all of sudden these calls start coming. It was new to me.

As I say above, this is a scoop. As far as I can tell, it has never been reported. I have searched both Google and the private news database Infomart, and no English-language media outlet comes up -- just some blogs.

That’s amazing, considering it was testimony before the Gomery Commission, on January 24, 2005. And the transcripts have been available on the Internet ever since. You can see the full transcripts of Clermont’s testimony – and his cross-examination – here.

For some reason – perhaps there were just too many juicy revelations flying around then, and this one slipped through the cracks – this stunning story was ignored.

By the way, Clermont is impeccably non-partisan; after a stellar career in the private sector, he was head-hunted into Canada Post, where he soon rose to the top. That last appointment was under the Conservatives, but he continued in that capacity under the Chretien Liberals. If anything, he was one of them – as he pointed out at page 10725 of his testimony:

…since 1966, I believe, my wife and I -- especially my wife -- had worked very closely with The Honourable Pierre Trudeau… So, I was more associated with the Liberal Party, if you like. My wife was the official agent in Montreal of Mr. Trudeau during his entire political career…

There are dozens of other fascinating details in his testimony of how Canada Post’s business culture was assaulted by Chretien’s government. Here’s another example of the petty, Tammany Hall-style politics that oozed into Canada Post by the Liberals:

MR. ROY: Did you have frequent contact yourself, when you were president and CEO, with the minister in charge of the Canada Post Corporation, Mr. Gagliano?

MR. CLERMONT: … With the previous Minister, under the previous government, I mean, we would go present service quality results, financial results, et cetera, et cetera, and after that, it became more about what we were doing. It was always what we were doing that could promote such-and-such an idea or such-and- such a policy.

MR. ROY: What does that mean?

MR. CLERMONT: It means promoting the federal government or the Liberal Party or whatever in such-and-such a place.

MR. ROY: Where? I don’t understand.

MR. CLERMONT: In such-and-such a province, such-and- such a part of the country. It was particularly focused on Quebec… It was such simple ideas… -- when you come into Montreal on the Trans Canada, there is the Saint-Laurent sorting centre on the right, just before going up Metropolitan Boulevard. So, we had a sign there with the Corporation’s logo, its corporate image. It had a red background. The Minister was insulted because -- it was on a blue background -- because it had to be on a red background. I had marked Canada there. So we had to change all our signs, that sort of thing.

Can you imagine a cabinet minister in a G8 democracy ordering a particular post office sorting plant to change its logo from blue to red, because those were the Liberal colours?

Alas, if only all of the Liberal interventions were so banal.

Kinsella’s weren’t. Switching ad agencies without notice or cause is worse than an indulgence. It’s worse than patronage. It’s exactly what was wrong with the Liberal Party’s culture – a culture of political entitlement, that treated public assets like private chattels, to be handed out as spoils of battle. And demanding that a lawyer be fired because his father was a Tory? What a buffoon.

Until now, Michael Ignatieff didn’t know about Kinsella’s improper interference in this crown agency. In January, 2005, when this testimony was sworn, Ignatieff was still teaching at Harvard. Even if he had been in Canada, he wouldn’t have known about it, because of the media's omission of Clermont’s testimony.

But that’s changed now. Ignatieff can’t plead ignorance anymore about Kinsella’s inappropriate conduct. He can see it in black and white, testified under oath, uncontradicted, right here.

Is Warren Kinsella’s improper political interference in Canada Post’s affairs acceptable to Ignatieff? If not, why is Kinsella still on Ignatieff's campaign team?